I also enjoyed it far less than I wanted to. Re: Your 2nd point : I find this really funny as I just started a sorc the other day and one my first reactions was how terrible the spell animations look for a modern game. I’ve been tempted to re-install Diablo 3 just to compare them, as I remember them being much better.

I finished the campaign as a Druid and am now tinkering with the other classes, so nowhere near endgame, all my feedback is just from the above.

• The writing is bad, laughably bad. Not like, bad grammar or sloppy prose bad but just like…written by a really edgy teenager and then heavily edited by adults who weren’t allowed to change any of the actual plot points bad? There were some good ideas (trying to avoid spoilers), but (for me) none of them ever went anywhere. And there were so many just…dumb/silly things…nevermind all the cutscenes rendered with the games engine that look laughably bad/amateur compared to Blizzard games like…what is going on with those??
• D3 items were a hot mess of garbage compared to D2 and I think these might be a tiny bit better, but still seem overly messy and the mod pool is too big. I also don’t think I found a “real” unique yet? They all seem like RNG trash just there for the aspects to be extracted? I could be wrong here, maybe the real uniques come later but if so that’s (more) bad design imho.
• frequent lag
• agree on the automap. Quest interface also seems poorly designed and very frustrating to use.
• the whole thing feels aggressively like a console game ported to PC, not vice versa. I strongly dislike that in my PC games.

FWIW, I’m enjoying playing my sorc more than the druid, but we’ll see. By the last 2 acts, I could close my eyes and hold two buttons and kill any of the bosses (except the last boss where you have move 3-4 times).

Mudding! Wow. Oh man, that’s some memories… scrapes the dust off brain I’m still a wizard/programmer on one that I check in on every few years, maybe fix a bug. Hope to have more time to tinker …someday!